Patient-centric solutions and patient empowerment are current trends in healthcare. It has been found that it may be beneficial to involve patients and their families more in their healthcare. Patient satisfaction, experience and empowerment are important factors for medical practice.
During a care cycle (e.g. cardiology or oncology), patients are typically overwhelmed with the amount of information accessible to them. In the case of chronic diseases such as cancer, patients tend to receive and seek a lot of information. Many times, once diagnosed, patients do not know where to start looking for the right information, nor do they understand what information they should look for, i.e. information that is relevant and necessary for them. This is partly due to them still having to cope emotionally and psychologically with their condition, and partly due to lack of guidance.
It is known that regardless of the (comprehensive) information that patients receive from their care provider, even if it is considered to be complete information/educational material, patients will still seek for more sources, either online or via their personal network. For example, patients can use an Internet search engine, such as Google, to search for information relating to their disease, by submitting a query into the search engine and reviewing the search results. For example, the user can submit a query with the name of their disease.
“Informing Patients: A Guide for Providing Patient Health Information”, by Paul C. Tang et al., in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 5, Number 6, November/December 1998, discusses patients' need for information surrounding ambulatory-care visits. The document discloses providing printed summary information to patients at the end of a clinic visit to improve their understanding of their care.